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Littlefield House

George Littlefield died in this campus mansion in 1920, and The Daily Texan, the University of Texas student paper, reports that people see a woman they take for his wife, Alice, at the upstairs windows.

, in

Austin, Texas

History

The Littlefield House stands on the corner of West 24th Street and Whitis Avenue, on the west side of the University of Texas campus. It is the last of the grand Victorian houses that once stood on its street, at the edge of the “Forty Acres,” as the campus was called. In 1893, George and Alice Littlefield had the house built. George had fought for the Confederacy as a cavalry officer, made his fortune in cattle, and founded a bank in Austin. Both of the couple’s children had died as babies. George and Alice hoped their nieces and nephews would one day go to the university next door. In the early 1900s, about 30 of them lived in the house as UT students.

George sat on the university’s Board of Regents. The Handbook of Texas, the Texas State Historical Association’s encyclopedia, says he gave the university more than any other single person did in its first 50 years. His home was among the gifts. He died there in November 1920. Alice stayed on. She died in the house in January 1935, and the university took it over. In 2016, Jim Nicar, a local historian, said the building had since been briefly a sorority house and music practice rooms. During World War II, the house was the Naval ROTC building, with anti-aircraft guns on the front lawn and a firing range in the attic. Nicar said the bullet holes from the targets could still be seen up there.

Hauntings & Lore

“Ghost tales about the home abound, and their variety is exceeded only by their vagueness,” the University of Texas said of the Littlefield House in a 2002 feature on its website. Alice is in most of them.

Alice in the Attic

Some say, the university’s feature went on, that George Littlefield locked Alice up in the attic when he was away. That way, she couldn’t be grabbed by “Yankees who might be strolling by and oblivious to the fact that the Civil War was over.” In the same story, bats attacked her while she languished up there, and her shrieks of terror still ring through the house. Others say her ghost can be heard banging out a chord or two on the old piano on the first floor.

Some accounts, the feature said, paint Alice as “a melancholic, depressive, agoraphobic woman who slowly and quietly went insane later in life.” Others stress her fears for her husband’s safety when he was away. Her ghost is said to roam the attic, peering out of the windows and watching for his return. Some people have seen the small round window in one of the attic’s turrets shuttered at some times and not at others. The only way to reach that window is to climb into the empty attic and crawl through a small hole into the turret.

In 2016, David Gracy, George Littlefield’s great-grandnephew and the family’s historian, called the attic story false. “There is no basis for that and it trashes the character of those people, not to mention that they did so much for the University,” he said. Jim Nicar, the local historian, had his own explanation. “I think [the legend exists] because [it’s] the only house on campus, and it is the oldest,” he said. “Campus myths are contagious and prolific on any campus.”

In 2023, the student paper, The Daily Texan, put the Littlefield House among the most haunted buildings on campus. Many witnesses, the paper said, report that members of Littlefield’s family haunt the building, especially Alice. In their stories, ghostly noises echo throughout the house, a piano on the second floor plays by itself, and the eyes of a portrait of Littlefield follow visitors around the main hall. The university’s 2002 feature put the piano on the first floor. The paper’s sources have also seen a woman, seemingly Alice, peering through the windows on the second floor.

Visit

Visiting Littlefield House

  • How to visit: Exterior only. The University of Texas uses the house for offices and events, so see it from the sidewalk, or hear its story on a tour that stops outside (see Tours That Stop Here).

Location

302 W 24th St, Austin, TX 78705

Dig Deeper

Tours That Stop Here

Contributors

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Sources (4)

Littlefield, George Washington

Handbook of Texas · Texas State Historical Association

The Daily Texan

the ghost stories (UT's Haunted Hotspots, 2023) and the house's history, with the family historian's denial of the attic story (Littlefield descendant shares history of Littlefield House, 2016)

Littlefield Spirit Lives On: House is a Victorian ghost of the past

The University of Texas at Austin · Kay Randall, 2002

San Antonio Light, January 9, 1935, p. 6

Chronicling America, Library of Congress